Ramdorai Sujatha

Massimo Silvano, ICTP Photo Archives

The Ramanujan Prize is the only international prize honouring mathematicians from developing countries — and was won yesterday (19 December) by Ramdorai Sujatha, a female researcher from India, who was awarded the prize at a ceremony in Trieste, Italy.

Ramdorai Sujatha, an associate professor from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, was in part honoured for her work on the "arithmetic of algebraic varieties".

The award — given every year to a mathematician under 45 — is a source of inspiration for mathematicians from developing countries, she told BBC Online.

Sujatha was educated in India and has been with the institute since 1985. While she does not think that being a woman has hindered her career, she believes that scientific policies could be more sensitive to the problems that women face.

The US$10,000 prize — named after the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan — was set up last year by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, to strengthen science in developing countries.